About Jason Thibeault

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

As part of our investigation, we attempted to determine if data fabrication or falsification may have occurred and interviewed the subject, critics, and disciplinary experts in coming to our conclusions. As a result of our interviews we concluded:

1. The subject did not directly receive NSF research funding as a Principal Investigator until late 2001 or 2002.
2. The Subject’s data is documented and available to researchers.
3. There are several concerns raised about the quality of the statistical analysis techniques that were used in the Subject’s research.
4. There is no specific evidence that the Subject falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.
5. There was concern about how extensively the Subject’s research had influenced the debate in the overall research field.

[…]

To recommend a finding of research misconduct, the preponderance of the evidence must show that with culpable intent the Subject committed an act that meets the definition of research misconduct (in this case, data fabrication or data falsification).

The research in question was originally completed over 10 years ago. Although the Subject’s data is still available and still the focus of significant critical examination, no direct evidence has been presented that indicates the Subject fabricated the raw data he used for his research or falsified his results.

Climate denialists will, completely within their character parameters, not give a shit. They’re not in the business of “facts”, they’re selling a fully antiscientific conspiracy theory that only grows stronger in the face of facts to the contrary. The next sentence of the report goes on to suggest that the only debate in the matter is whether the statistical methods used were appropriate, which is a wildly different conversation from the one we were having up until now. But the denialists are, frankly, famous for latching onto a single, easily misunderstood sentence.

The backfire effect is constantly shaping your beliefs and memory, keeping you consistently leaning one way or the other through a process psychologists call biased assimilation. Decades of research into a variety of cognitive biases shows you tend to see the world through thick, horn-rimmed glasses forged of belief and smudged with attitudes and ideologies.

That about sums it up.

The most horrible part about this is, while we do have facts to back up our claims, we are vulnerable to the same “you’re just experiencing the Backfire Effect” accusation — in much the same way as people who understand that the Earth is round might be vulnerable to such accusations from a flat-Earther. I mean, we’re also vulnerable to accusations of being polka-dotted unicorns with a penchant for human flesh, while we’re itemizing things that people could accuse us of if facts are thrown right out the window. But we’re vulnerable all the same, and I expect the first antiscience troll (who will no doubt show up first over at Greg Laden’s) will accuse us of being mired in our ideologies and accusations of malfeasance by some ever-widening conspiracy.

Only, it’s far more galling when, despite the lack of evidence for these accusations of malfeasance, they just keep on coming, repeated ad nauseam, because “malfeasance” is almost transparently the modus operandi of the folks who’d rather destroy the planet to make a buck. Attack your opponents’ strength, and all that. Explains why when we point out denialists’ weakness in whom they’re supporting (the oil industry), they counter by questioning the money-making intentions of people who write books about this stuff. They attack our strength in our lacking money as a motivating factor, by claiming we’re just trying to make a quick buck. Somehow. As though the pay scales between book authorship or scientific study grants, and owning a fucking oil company, are even remotely competitive.

This is the vector that this fight will take. We must expect that we are no longer able to simply sway people with mere facts; not when the lies are shouted from the rooftops and the truth merely whispered apologetically under the din of the denialists. We need to change our tactic — to not allow them to shout us down, to refuse to allow the media to bury the “corrections” to their anti-science hitpieces in the middle of their obits page. We need to hold the information gatekeepers responsible for the misinformation and the lies that are propagated. Our species’ future is at stake.

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About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

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“We need to change our tactic — to not allow them to shout us down, to refuse to allow the media to bury the “corrections” to their anti-science hitpieces in the middle of their obits page. We need to hold the information gatekeepers responsible for the misinformation and the lies that are propagated.”

Where have you been? The media has already done that, right up until the fall of 2009 the media only reported alarmist misinformation, deniers were ignored and had no voice. What, did you forget? I have been fighting climate alarmism since the spring of 2007 and I can assure you denialists had no voice in the media and had no voice on the web at that time. If you ever wrote against climate alarmism on the web, you were deleted immediately. It was not until the spring of 2009 were skeptics/denialists suddenly not deleted as much in the blogosphere, and not until the fall of 2009 did news outlets suddenly begin allowing denialists to be heard. So you want to go back to those days? Sorry pal, that’s not going to happen.

Even today, most climate skepticism is still deleted from alarmist blogs. I expect no different from this one.

You must be relatively new at your job as anti-science blog patroller, then! Climate denialists have existed for far longer than that! It was only in about 2007 that true skeptics stopped allowing the term “skeptic” to be applied to people who were actually climate denialists — the term “skepticism” indicates a lack of evidence and defaulting to the null hypothesis in its absence. There’s a ton of evidence that climate change is happening. Denialists simply deny that that evidence exists. This fight has been going on at least since the IPCC was first commissioned in 1988, if not before then — and the media was as divided then between reality-based and anti-reality-based as it is now. Only then, the Fairness Doctrine still existed in the states, so people weren’t allowed to outright lie unchallenged.

Cries of “oh waah you’re going to delete me” do make me want to delete you, but I’m not going to. I’ll leave it as a monument to your ignorance. Don’t worry though — if Richard Muller can realize when he’s made a mistake and testify before congress that the data he compiled does actually support AGW, surely you could realize your errors and apologize to my blog readers.

I expect the first antiscience troll (who will no doubt show up first over at Greg Laden’s) will accuse us being mired in our ideologies and accusations of malfeasance by some ever-widening conspiracy.

Hey, Jason, did you by chance hire Jamie Funk to do your prognosticating?

That was some kind of weird supernatural magic you pulled right there….

[…] All of this perfectly reasonable procedural stuff… and yet it’s STILL the focal point of a hundred thousand astroturf comments on every article or blog post across the entire internet. Some of them might legitimately be people’s opinions, but there’s decent evidence that it’s mostly bought dissent. And this dissent, and this ginned up controversy, keep going strong despite the Climategate scientists and the methodology being vindicated no less than seven times. […]